I have just got back from a week in Dubuque, Iowa on a conference organised by Emmaus Bible College and Tilsley College, Motherwell about setting up and running small scale training centres.
Emmaus are probably best known in the UK and the rest of the world for their correspondence courses, the head office being on the site of the college. The college itself has about 250 students who study a range of subjects but with an emphasis on Biblical Studies.
There were about 60 of us at the conference, from countries as far apart as Zambia, Peru and Papua New Guinea; to say nothing of the Czech Republic!
It was an excellent time. The people at Emmaus were wonderfully hospitable, running the conference for free for all participants. The campus was built in the 1950s by the Catholics as a seminary but sold to Emmaus in the 1980s. This means that the main building has at its heart a large, marble-clad church with stained glass windows of various saints!! Not quite what you expect from a Brethren-based college!
I expect for anyone not involved in training and equipping Christians for service, most of the week would have seemed remarkably tiresome with workshops and papers on curriculum development, accreditation of courses and funding of centres. However, I found it not only interesting but also very helpful for the situation we find ourselves in here. Most of the participants are further along the line in setting up and running their centres than we are so it was good to be able to hear of their experiences and - hopefully! - learn from their mistakes. Perhaps the most exciting - because it has been running only a few years but seen real growth in that time - is the GLO centre in Zambia. There is a video here which gives some idea of what they are doing - made even more interesting for us as a couple of Faroese girls are on it.
Please continue to pray that we will be given the wisdom we need as we seek to plan and then start our first residential course in September 2011.
